Prior to her PhD, Melinda obtained a Master of Biotechnology from The University of Queensland (UQ) in 2013. Mid-way through her Masters, Melinda realised that it was possible to combine her two passions, computers and biology. In 2014 Melinda decided to continue working in computational biology and joined the Beatson laboratory to undertake her PhD, supervised by A/Prof Scott Beatson and Dr Brian Forde. Here, her work focused on the accessory genome in extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC), with projects including antimicrobial resistance lineages, DNA methylation and the intersection of the methylome and transcriptome. More broadly, her research interests lie in genomic epidemiology and how mobile genetic elements shape the evolution of bacterial lineages.

Melinda was awarded her PhD in February 2019 and is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Computational Microbiologist in the Beatson laboratory. Melinda has a broad range of skills and knowledge in microbial genomics and sequencing technologies. She is particularly interested in teaching, with tutoring experience in bioinformatics, microbiology and genetics. Melinda was also a lecturer in 2019, teaching into the Genomics and Bioinformatics undergraduate course BIOL3004. As an Australian Society of Microbiology communications ambassador from 2017-2019, Melinda’s interests also include science communication.

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Big congrats due to Doctor Leah Roberts (@Loolibear), awarded PhD this week, next week takes up her EMBL-EBI Fellowship at University of Cambridge and EBI with @ZaminIqbal and @EsteeTorok. We will miss you! Best wishes for a bright future. Scott @beatsonlab @LabSchembri @ace_uq